Rare or obscure, and fetching stratospheric prices among crate-diggers, has never been a guarantee of musical merit. However, I’m happy to report that in the case of these new limited-edition vinyl reissues of a pair of mega-obscurities from the 1970s, your listening enjoyment is most definitely assured. Frederiksberg, the New York-based label founded in 2013 by Danish video journalist and music lover Andreas Vingaard, has done a fantastic job in unearthing these two treasures and bringing them to a wider audience.

Original copies (beware, there are bootlegs about) of trumpeter, composer (he wrote all the music on this album) and educator Milt Ward’s spacey funk jazz epic, issued on the private Twin Quest label in 1977, regularly fetch £300-£400, assuming you can find one, so this reissue of Ward’s only album as leader is extremely welcome. Milt Ward & Virgo Spectrum is a wonderful stew of spacey psych-jazz, with healthy dollops of soul and funk tossed in, seasoned with a little Latin and some wild synthesiser playing. Opener ‘Mr Cheese’, with its darting flute and powerful horns over an insistent bassline makes for a great start, but things go stratospheric with the next track, ‘The Foreigner’ with hard-blown sax and killer percussion. Side Two’s closer ‘Juneboy’s Frismas’, is the sweetest treat of all, starting off with wild cacophony before settling into a powerful, tangentially Latin groove, driven by outstanding horn and synth work and Martinez’s often monstrous electric bass (combining beautifully later on with McBee’s roiling double bass – the use of electric and acoustic basses together is a particularly pleasing feature of this album). One can see why this album has become something of a ‘grail’ for collectors. It’s, well, just different. It has all the familiar elements and instrumentation of a late 1970s electric jazz record, but strangely it ends up sounding nothing like anything you’ve heard before. A real-one off – and all the better for it – and a testament to the late (Ward died in 1987 of a heart attack, aged just 43) trumpeter’s skills as a musician, composer and bandleader.

The Compass record isn’t quite as distinctive, but almost as good. Financed by the band themselves, 500 copies were privately issued on the Schoolhouse Productions label in 1972 and, on the rare occasions it comes up for sale nowadays, Compass Rises commands £400 or more for a mint copy. Formed in rural upstate New York, Compass only made this one album, but played live together on and off until 2017. On the evidence of Rises they were a tight, electric-accented modal jazz outfit with an excellent composer in Rick Lawn, who wrote six of the seven tunes (the other, Tom Ives’ ‘Cleanin’ Up’ is also splendid) and a nice line in versatility. They try most of the stylistic directions current in jazz at the time, and make a very good fist of all them, from the CTi-esque Rhodes funk of ‘Blues For Vito’ to the spacey ‘Schizo’ via the Getz-esque shuffle of ‘Sunflower’.

Reissued with the full consent of the musicians or their estates, both LPs are beautifully mastered and pressed, and presented in authentic facsimiles of the original sleeves with extensively-illustrated and superbly-researched booklets. Head over to Frederiksberg’s Bandcamp or your local record dealer and get ‘em while you can.